The narrative in suspense: Women at the intersection of feminism and postmodernism in the late-twentieth-century novel

This project identifies and explores “the narrative in suspense”—a postmodernist feminist fictional form that dismantles the conventional “marriage or death” formula of Anglo-American novelistic discourse to posit new, less constraining structural and thematic roles for women in the novel. While some novelists and theorists respond to what Jean-François Lyotard calls the “postmodern[…]incredulity toward metanarratives” with a sense of despair or meaninglessness, I contend that we can also find optimism in the plurality of provisional narratives that characterize the “postmodern condition.” Some recent novels work with—although, importantly, not entirely within—the conventions of realism to intervene in normative narrative constructions, grasping the postmodern condition as an opportunity for repositioning women in the novel and ultimately in the social structures that both produce and are produced by the novel. In Part One I extend and complicate Linda Hutcheon's formulation of “complicitous critique” through my synthesis of Lyotard's theory of the local, contingent narrative and Hélène Cixous's mandate for an explosive feminist “sortie” into conventional discourse. I then read Angela Carter's “Reflections” as a literary counterpart to this theoretical matrix that covertly interrogates the gender dynamics implicit in the advent of postmodernism and dares other texts to continue this work. The novels I read in Part Two respond to this “dare” by reworking the conventions of realism to reconceptualize women's thematic and structural roles in the novel. I show that Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit performs revisionary work from within established genres and texts including the Bildungsroman, the love plot, and the Bible to advocate its protagonist's liberating use of narrative. My reading of Margaret Atwood's Lady Oracle demonstrates that narrative itself—the stories we tell about ourselves, and the stories that are told about us—informs perceptions of self and reality, and thus the postmodern local narrative can be deployed to reconfigure women's experiences. Widening the scope of my inquiry beyond character and text, I finally assert that Winterson's Written on the Body evokes a participatory postmodern reader obliged to engage in the “complicitous critique” that Hutcheon identifies as the definining characteristic of postmodern art.